It was a sweltering summer day in a village outside of Nairobi, Africa. Jenna Tourje, a second-year graduate student in urban and regional planning, approached a man who lived in a mud hut in the middle of the African savannah. Armed with a translator at her side, Tourje sat down, among the gathering of goats and chickens, to speak with the man about his water needs in order to understand what kind of project her group, Engineers Without Borders (EWB), could accomplish at that site. As the conversation came to an end, Tourje heard the ring of a cell phone. To her surprise, the man, who had almost nothing to support his three wives and starving children, took out a cell phone. At the moment, Tourje realized how incredibly connected the world had become.
Most people don’t remember the dreams they had as a child. For me, however, the vivid images of my childhood nightmares will be forever ingrained in my memory because they always involve the same scenario: an earthquake.
An old man in his sixties chants a mantra in a metaphysical center in Anaheim, California. The smell of rose incense and sage permeates across a room with high ceilings and old carpeting.
A trip to the supermarket is reassuring when you find that you’re following your budget. Yet, while manufacturers aren’t raising prices on your favorite products, they are coming up with clever ways to offset rising costs by downsizing products, which means charging the same price for a lighter package.
Whether it be a simple T-shirt, skin-tight jeans, a dressy blouse or grey sweatpants, each piece of clothing has a style to communicate. Everything comes with a tone or color that may connect you to the serenity of nature, compliment the color of your eyes or force you to stick out in a sea of people.
This summer I visited family in Seattle. And yes, we took the Twilight tour. But what I discovered on that tour was something much different than the somewhat magical, absolutely cheesy and kind of action-packed world of vampires and werewolves. I discovered the actual lives of the people living there and what I observed is far beyond what the books describe.
